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Keir James Cecil Martin

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.

Corporations are among the most important of the institutions that shape lives across the globe. They often have a “taken for granted” character, both in everyday discourse and in economic or management theory, where they are often described as an inevitable outcome of the natural working of markets. Anthropological analysis suggests that neither the markets that are seen as their foundation nor corporations as social entities can be understood in this manner. Instead, their existence has to be seen as contingent on particular social relations and as being the outcome of long processes of historic conflict. The extent to which, at the start of the 21st century, corporations satisfactorily fulfill their supposed purpose of managing debt obligations in order to stimulate economic growth is particularly open to question. This was traditionally the justification for the establishment of corporations as separate legal actors in economic markets. Some 150 years on, other sociocultural relations and perspectives shape their boundaries and activities in a manner that means that their purpose and character can no longer be assumed on the basis of such axiomatic premises. Instead, their actions can be explained only on the basis of historic and ethnographic analysis of the contests over the limits of relational obligation that shape their boundaries.

Susan Brownell and Niko Besnier

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.

Sport offers a unique path to mobility to men—and to a much lesser degree women—who are members of disadvantaged groups and whose options for seeking a better life are otherwise limited. This mobility may be either social class mobility—as in basketball as a way out of racially segregated ghettos in the United States—or geographic mobility—as in the migration of soccer and rugby players from the Global South to the Global North in order to play in professional leagues there. Sport mobility potentially differs from the mobility based on manual and menial labor that is the more common path for such groups because successful professional athletes are regarded as heroes both by urban elites in their transplanted homes and by their compatriots back in their home neighborhoods, villages, and countries. At the same time, the hope to migrate to a successful career is often thwarted by the same structural conditions that thwart ordinary migrants’ mobility.

Different sports are associated with different social values that reflect the race, gender, social class, national, and global structures of power that underpin them. Until the past few decades, sports acquired their social value through a process of distinction in which gender, class, racial, and other differences were exaggerated by strategies of inclusion and exclusion. These differences were most closely guarded in sports organized by exclusive clubs, but they were also defended by other types of organizations such as schools and professional leagues. In the West, where most global sports originated, this produced a system of contrasting relationships between sport meanings: for example, golf, tennis, figure skating, and equestrian sports signified elite social status, while soccer, boxing, and—at least at the elite levels—basketball, baseball, and American football were identified with athletes from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. In this way, sports produced an embodied social value in the form of the bodies of individual athletes, and until the last decades of the 20th century, this value was largely traded in the realm of symbolic capital and not economic capital—with the exception of a comparatively small number of athletes in professionalized sports. Furthermore, the embodied values of sports varied greatly between localities, nations, and world regions, shaped by the class structure, history, and culture of the body in a given locale.

However, at the end of the 20th century, the embodied values of many—if not most—individual sports became increasingly unmoored from their local, regional, ethnic, or national values and more tightly embroiled in global sport systems that have become increasingly commodified. Team sports, such as soccer, baseball, basketball, rugby, cricket, and ice hockey, and individual sports, such as tennis, golf, track and field, gymnastics, figure skating, and boxing, saw a large increase in the transnational mobility of athletes and coaches. These developments in the sports world reflected global changes in the global political economy: revenues from television broadcasting rights fees skyrocketed as television networks were privatized and proliferated; corporate sponsorship and advertising expanded along with the new television platforms; increasingly multinational sources of capital (such as corporations and billionaire team owners) were infused into sports; and elite athletes’ salaries, sponsorships, and transfer fees increased vertiginously in the most popular sports and seeped downward in the system. Clubs and teams began searching for talent further and further afield, bringing over players from the developing world. In US college sports (an anomaly on the world scene), the training of children toward the goal of gaining athletic scholarships became a growing industry that has even extended into China. In the Global South, at the same time, neoliberal development policies resulted in the reorganization or, in some cases, destruction of local agriculture and other forms of local production, as well as the social and economic relations that had been attached to them. Young men, who were particularly affected, now had to migrate to find employment and thus achieve the ideal of productive adult masculinity. These two factors produced a remarkable increase in the number of athletes from developing countries seeking employment as professionals in the industrialized world. For ever greater numbers of athletes, then, the embodied value of the body was no longer limited to symbolic or social capital but was all about economic capital.

The commodification of the sporting body and the transnationalization of the structures that determine its value provide novel and instructive insight into the changing nature of the global political economy since the end of the 20th century.

Philip Carl Salzman

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.

Pastoralists depend for their livelihood on raising livestock on natural pasture. Livestock may be selected for meat, milk, wool, traction, carriage, or riding, or a combination of these. Pastoralists rarely rely solely on their livestock; they may also engage in hunting, fishing, cultivation, commerce, predatory raiding, or extortion. Some pastoral peoples are nomadic and others are sedentary, while yet others are partially mobile. Economically, some pastoralists are subsistence oriented, while others are market oriented, with others combining the two. Politically, some pastoralists are independent or quasi-independent tribes, while others, largely under the control of states, are peasants, and yet others are citizens engaged in commercial production in modern states.

All pastoralists have to address a common set of issues. The first issue is gaining and taking possession of livestock, including good breeding stock. Ownership of livestock may involve individual, group, or distributed rights. The second concern is managing the livestock through husbandry and herding. Husbandry refers to the selection of animals for breeding and maintenance, while herding involves ensuring that the livestock gains access to adequate pasture and water. Pasture access can be gained through territorial ownership and control, purchase, rent, or patronage. Security must be provided for the livestock through active human oversight or restriction by means of fences or other barriers. Manpower is provided by kin relations, exchange of labor, barter, monetary payment, or some combination.

Prominent pastoral peoples are sheep, goat, and camel herders in the arid band running from North Africa through the Middle East and northwest India; the cattle and small stock herders of Africa south of the Sahara; reindeer herders of the sub-Arctic northern Eurasia; the camelid herders of the Andes; and the ranchers of North and South America.

Michelle MacCarthy

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.

Indigenous peoples worldwide are affected by, and engage with, tourism in several major ways. On the one hand, the tourism industry in its constant expansion appropriates indigenous peoples’ land and resources, creating tensions and escalating inequalities. In some cases, indigenous peoples may have a role to play (with various levels of agency and power on their own part) in welcoming people into their homes and on their land, for the purposes of ecotourism (in which pristine environments, usually with rare or endemic species of plants, birds, or other living organisms are attractive to tourists), or because the people themselves and their way of life are of interest to tourists. What is more, the graves and monuments of the ancestors of indigenous people, local festivals, and ceremonies may be recognized as “marketable” from a tourism perspective and promoted to encourage tourist visits, which may or may not be considered disruptive or disrespectful from an indigenous perspective. So-called indigenous tourism development refers to tourism in which indigenous people and communities are directly involved (in varying degrees) in the industry, whether as owners and tour operators or as porters and servants. Many scholars from anthropology, sociology, human geography, and other related disciplines have sought to address some of the issues and concerns regarding the relationship between tourism and indigenous peoples, drawing on examples from around the globe in order to illustrate the multitude of ways in which this relationship operates. Ways that indigenous peoples’ relationship to tourism may be explored include contexts such as tourism to visit ancient monuments and UNESCO-listed world heritage sites, tourism in search of cultural difference, cruise travel and luxury resorts, and ecotourism.